900Mhz Laptop Good enough to be a Gateway?

Hi,

I've got a 900Mhz Celeron, 128MB RAM Laptop. I was wondering if I have a fast enough processor to share my broadband connection (that connects to my laptop via USB) to my sisters old Win98 166Mhz PC (which will conenct to my laptop via Ethernet).

Will I be taking up a lot of processing power of my laptop and might as well get a router? Or is my laptop fast enough?

Thanks in advance,
Ehsan

I think I'd be more worried about that 166Mhz machine handling the flow of data created by a broadband connection. How much memory does it have?

I don't think there will be any problem on your computer.

Well I asked a freind of mine and he said there should be no problem with such an old computer, he says he's networked slow running mahcines like that before.

It is a 166Mhz, 2GB HHD, 16 MB RAM Fujitsu. Bought it about 7 years ago! It originally came with win 95 OS.

I am thinking of installing a netwrok (NIC) card on it soon. Is this old PC compaible enough? Am I taking a risk such that I will have to end up eBaying the NIC and crossover cable that I wish to connect up this really old computer with?

This 166Mhz still works well on dialup and with general MS office programs. It can handle MSN & winamp too. But nooooo games or flash mx or anything!

You should be fine. You should be able to find Win 98 drivers for most NIC cards. Before you buy it, just check on the Internet that you can find correct drivers.

My point was simply that the internet won't be as fast as you might expect b/c the computer itself will have a hard time handling the incoming data. You shouldn't have a problem actually networking them, but the amount of data, or rather, the speed at which the data is coming to that computer, may slow it down a bit.

I used to install cable modems. We required 200Mhz w/ 32MB RAM to do an install, and even when the computer met those minimums, the high speed didn't perform like it did on other, faster computers.

Oh, I do apologies! This older computer will only be using the internet through my laptop fow emailing, MSN messenger and bowsing purposes only.

If my younger brother or sister start downloading MP3's or start playing games, I'll shall pull out the ethernet cable!

I understand that such an old computer will not be able to take high speed internet, sounds reasonable enough.

I will do that most definitely. Thanks you.